Yet Jacob Abbott insists on sneaking other great adventures in between the paragraphs of my story.

He thinks, of course, that we must consider the expansive, and possibly true, reports of Livingstone (a Scottish explorer in Africa) or Humboldt (who travelled extensively in Latin America exploring and describing it for the first time from a modern scientific point of view) and Kane ( to put this report in perspective; a member of two Arctic expeditions to rescue the explorer Sir John Franklin).

Why poor Jacob Abbott had to include these three men in the middle of my story is beyond comprehension and a little impudent. I wish Snorri Sturluson had written my story like he did for Egil Skallagrimsson. But of course, Snorri had been murdered before I was born.

That gets the preliminaries out of the way. Now I have to tell you about my father; Yezonkai Behadr; a great khan himself.